Intelligent automated assistants (or digital assistants) can provide a beneficial interface between human users and electronic devices. Such assistants can allow users to interact with devices or systems using natural language in spoken and/or text forms. For example, a user can provide a speech input containing a user request to a digital assistant operating on an electronic device. The digital assistant can interpret the user's intent from the speech input and operationalize the user's intent into tasks. The tasks can then be performed by executing one or more services of the electronic device, and a relevant output responsive to the user request can be returned to the user.
Digital assistants can interpret user intent by means of natural language processing. In particular, the user's speech input can be parsed to determine the semantic intent that is most likely implicated by the speech input. The process of identifying the most likely semantic intent can be computationally intensive. Further, in some cases, an incorrect semantic intent may be deduced due to the speech input implicating several possible semantic intents. This can adversely affect response latency of the digital assistant as well as the accuracy of the response obtained.